Access All
by paradiso
Summary: Stella/Mac. Short. Her memory does its best to write off the experience with a “sorry about that Stella, let’s just pretend that never happened."


A/N: This switches back and forth from POVs and takes place over numerous periods of time. I fear it's too confusing and cheesy. Sorry.

**Access All**

_The night is cold and lonely and I'm cold and lonely at night. _

_The night runs in cycles, it meets me with the cold, and I meet a new would-be Stella Bonasera at night in dreams. Then when morning comes, the night leaves me lonely, and I face the day with another smile._

_I smile for another day._

--

"Aresanob..." Stella runs the word through her head and is puzzled. "Aresanob," she's missing a piece of the puzzle, she's just not sure what it is.

"Is it talk-like-a-pirate-day already?" asks Danny as he waltzes into the room.

"Back to work Danny," Mac, beside him, stifles a chuckle and nods at Stella.

He notices the sculpture on the desk because Danny's too busy laughing at his own joke to see that bewildered look on Stella's face – or anything else apparently. He decides to wait until Danny leaves the room to ask. Mac doesn't ask questions often, since he's paid to have all the answers, but he remembers her once telling him that her opinion of most art was not a very high one. Then it strikes him that she _is_ dating that artist, Frankie or whatever, and while that doesn't seem like enough to change her mind (and God, is she ever stubborn, there's nothing that can change her mind) it might have been enough to get her to accept that statue on her desk.

But he still felt sad that it was there. It made him feel like she was changing – even though, in all his years of knowing her, she's always been the same. She's beautiful throughout the year, intelligent in every season, and she's always been his rock. She's always been his final answer. So he wonders, _why the statue?_

--

_I'm scared, I realize._

_He realizes that I'm scared, and I think that's what gives him the strength to break into _her_ apartment. The fortress in which she stores her strength. And he's intruded upon that, and upon that intrusion, I reach for the phone, I reach for the strength that I hope is still inside of _me_. Somewhere, at the back of my head, before my head is thrown back – against a wall, against something – I think I need to pull some crazy fast move._

_But he pulls me back first. He's moving. He's faster. He's completely insane._

--

"Why the statue, Stell?" and Mac cringes because he's just used the nickname that he swore he never would.

"Oh, it was a gift."

"Yeah I figured that."

"So why did you ask?"

He's at a loss for words, and at first he thinks that it's because she's given him attitude, but then he realizes that she hasn't really given him anything except a normal reaction. He feels stupid because she's right, but more than that, he knows that he's let his guard down. She's curious, because he's always so careful and he just slipped up and she wants to know why.

"Why the nickname Mac?"

He looks at her.

"And why the poor observation? You losing your touch?" she arches an eyebrow.

She almost pleads with him a moment, but then the statue glares at her and reminds her just why she's being so snippy today. Mac doesn't notice the question in her eyes, the far-off affection that's disappeared since _the artist_ came into her life, he's too busy focusing on what she just said. It makes him realize that it's been a while since she's come to him to talk, and therefore, he hasn't had an opportunity to pull her into a hug or place a hand on her shoulder.

_She's right_, he thinks as she gives up on him again and leaves the room.

They have lost touch.

--

_He touches me and I'm disgusted. It's disgusting._

"_I'll show you what a crime scene really is," his voice slithers into my ears._

_The scene of the crime, an earlier one, runs before my eyes, and my head runs around the scene. And I wonder as, in this dream like state I kneel down to look at the body, if tomorrow Mac will kneel over me and wonder himself if this is all a dream. _

_But it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, wrong, wrong._

_My face to his fist. Fist to face. Face to floor._

"_Face the floor." _

_For now it's real. It's real, but now... there's a cord around my hands, and this has nothing to do with the accord that Frankie and I usually have, _had_, before I found out. Before he found me..._

--

"Find me," Stella whispers, and no one can hear except that blood-stained, clay disaster on the table.

She closes her eyes and thinks, _Mac,_ and she cries because there's no way for her to know that he's already halfway up the stairs to her apartment, Flack in tow, (they weren't about to risk the elevator).

There's a body next to her on the floor, but she doesn't recognize who it is. She doesn't even recognize _what_ it is (human, maybe) because her brain erased all memory of it at some point during the night. It's a defense mechanism, her most reliable one (aside from Mac) when she sees something she doesn't want to see, her heart shuts down and she becomes as objective as a jury. Meanwhile her memory does its best to write off the experience as a "sorry about that Stella, let's just pretend that never happened".

Hours later, with Flack in the hospital, she'll try her best to recount this night, against every principal she has. Against everything she's ever taught herself about being strong, and learning how to pick herself up off the floor and go on with life. Against the strong, invincible woman she tries so hard to be.

--

_There's a split second of silence, and the silence splits me before I split my wrists and their bindings. _

_I think I'm going to go on living, _maybe, _and maybe in the living room, Frankie has other plans, completely different from the way that I planned to have Frankie._

_He has me._

_Unless..._

--

"This wasn't your fault, Stell," he uses the nickname without shame months later.

"You can't just say that Frankie's...Frankie's mental instability."

"Frankie's desire to kill you-"

"Had nothing to do with me."

Mac sighs, but he holds himself back from exhibiting and other signs of exasperation with her stubbornness and reminds himself that she's hurting and that she needs him.

"This blame game you're playing," he says quietly, "You're only emotionally taxing yourself. Be-"

"Rational?" she's angry now, "I _am_ being rational Mac. What happened wasn't entirely his thing you know. It hadeverything to do with me, I get that, I accept that. It's not like I haven't had a negative affect on a guy before okay? I'm a detective."

"Stella, you have to believe me okay? He was mentally unbalanced from the start, people don't just turn into murderers because of _one_ relationship."

She arches an eyebrow again (like she did the day with the statue) because they've worked plenty of cases where the motive didn't seem to fit the crime, and found the suspect guilty.

"Theory of Relativity, quantum physics. Don't insult my intelligence Mac, I know what I'm talking about? There's a trigger for everyone. I was his trigger," she gets up to leave and is entirely unsure of whether or not she ever wants to speak to him again, "_Everything is connected_, remember Mac?"

He catches her by the wrist and manages to think nothing of the time when he did so with another woman (her face is blurry among the images of Stella on the floor, Stella in the office, Stella everywhere). He doesn't kiss her though (he only wishes he could).

"Of course Stella. We're all in this together."

--

_He shoots at me, relieved._

_And relief shoots through me when no bullets do._

_I shoot, and think it's over, I fall._

"_It's not over,"_ _Mac says when falls to his knees and sees me, and I can do nothing but lie here, exhausted, unseeing. _

_--_

"I thought you were dead, I cried."

She cries.

"I'm okay," she responds, mostly to herself, but smiles a little bit for Mac.

He's feeling a little selfish today too, so he embraces her, but she doesn't mind nor does she notice the pained look on his face and the quickened beat of his heart when she places her head in the crook of his neck. They fit.

For the first time since that night, Stella's glad to be in her own body with complete access to this man.

Mac doesn't mind so much either.

--

She remembers:

Bang_. I shoot._

_I shoot, and _bang.

_He stares, amazed by me._

"Me, amazed by me."

**fin.**

_July 2008._


End file.
